“Possibly,” I agreed, for I saw that the man was in an aggressively disputatious humour, and I wanted to have no words with him. “Well, what happened after that? Go on with your yarn, Svorenssen.”
“We saw you three or four times after that,” resumed Svorenssen, “and once you passed so close that we easily recognised both of you. Unfortunately, we were both up a tree at the time, and were unable to descend, for the reason that there was a savage brute of a wild pig that had driven us up aloft and was waiting below for us to come down again. Of course we shouted our loudest, and as long as there seemed any possibility that you might hear; but it was no good. I suspect it was the roar of the surf on the reef that drowned our voices. But every time we saw you, if you were not going alongside the wreck you were steering north. So at length we came to the conclusion that you had probably rigged up some sort of a shelter in that direction; and we accordingly agreed to work along-shore in a northerly direction, and try to find out where you had bestowed yourselves.
“To you, sailing along easily and comfortably in your boat, I dare say it would seem no very arduous job to work your way along a few miles of open beach; but to us two, circumstanced as we were, in a place swarming with savage brutes that seemed to be for ever lurking on the watch for us; without the means of kindling a fire as a protection; and with only our sheath-knives as weapons; obliged to enter the woods at the peril of our lives to obtain food—and as often as not driven out again without the food; able to sleep only during the day-time—and very often not even then; compelled to seek shelter in trees for hours at a time—ay, and often enough for a whole day—to save our lives, it was simply—well, there are no words strong enough to describe it. Why, there were days—plenty of them—when we did not make so much as a mile of progress; when, from one cause or another, we did not make a fathom, much less a mile. No wonder that we were so long a time working our way round to you. Indeed, now that I look back upon the innumerable difficulties that we had to contend with, my only surprise is that we ever managed to get here at all.
“Then, as an appropriate climax of all our difficulties, the forest one day caught fire—perhaps you saw the blaze?—and almost the whole of the island was swept clean of every green thing. Phew! that was an experience, with a vengeance! If I had not beheld the scene with my own eyes I could never have believed there were so many wild creatures in all the world as we then saw; great, fierce monkeys, bigger than a man; little monkeys in thousands; leopards; wild pigs as savage as lions; deer of all sorts and sizes; and creatures the like of which we had never seen or heard of before—they all came swarming down to the beach to escape the flames. And—a very curious circumstance I thought it—they were all so thoroughly terrified that none of them interfered with the others, or with us, but all stood huddled together by the water’s edge, bleating, squealing, roaring, howling—no, I cannot attempt to describe it; it is the kind of thing that has to be seen to be understood.
“Naturally, we all edged away as far as we could from the flames and the flying sparks, and eventually it began to dawn upon us all—beasts as well as men—that the extreme north end of the island might possibly be spared, and we all with one accord set off in that direction. And for a little while—twenty-four hours, or thereabout—we men did very well; the creatures all stood huddled together, trembling and making queer moaning, noises, too terrified to take notice of anybody or anything, and when we needed food all that was necessary was to lay hold of a deer, haul him out of the crowd, and cut his throat—and there was all the food we required.
“But that condition of affairs was of course quite temporary. No sooner had the fire burned itself out than the creatures recovered their courage and turned upon each other like—well, like wild beasts. Dirk and I quickly recognised that the north end of the island was too perilous a place for us. There was therefore nothing for us but to escape from our dangerous neighbours while we could, and this could only be done by bearing away south again, which we did.
“There was no cause for further fear of wild beasts as we pursued our journey southward; there was not a living thing to be seen anywhere ashore; even the birds had all vanished. That condition of affairs was of course all in our favour, so far as it went; but the unfortunate part of it was that the fruit was also destroyed; so that, while we could now rest undisturbed at night, our only food consisted of such raw shell-fish as we could find at the margin of the beach; and we could find no fresh water wherewith to quench our thirst.
“For two days and nights we were in that predicament, our thirst being terrible, and the only relief we could obtain—and it was very partial—was to enter the sea and lie down in it for about ten minutes, allowing the ripples to wash over us, and taking care not to go far enough in to give the sharks a chance to get at us. Then, when we felt sufficiently relieved, we staggered along for a few yards, repeating the process about thirty or forty times a day.
“At length, however, we found a stream of fresh water and camped beside it. But so terrible had been our suffering from thirst that, having at length found fresh water, we could not summon the courage to leave it again.
“One day, however, as we were seeking shell-fish on the beach near the mouth of the stream, Dirk suddenly remarked:—